Sony Ericsson launches Communication Entertainment Unlimited

How many megapixels can you squeeze into a cell phone ? On the even of the big Mobile World Congress wireless telecom trade show here in Barcelona, Spain, the race is on. At pre-show press conferences, Sony Ericsson launches (February 15, 2009) new prototype handsets Idou.

Sony Ericsson today unveiled the next step in its evolution. The Entertainment Unlimited consumer proposition is the pinnacle of what the company has been working towards since the start of the joint venture in 2001 – the true fusion of communication and entertainment.

Bringing together rich content, unique applications and best in class entertainment experiences, the new consumer proposition is based around three key promises:

• Uniting best in class entertainment experiences into one offering such as the Walkman™ music experience, the Cyber-shot imaging experience, Java gaming and messaging integrated with services and applications.
• Broadening entertainment experiences by seamlessly integrating the mobile phone into other devices in the home letting consumers share and enjoy top quality entertainment content through a variety of channels including TV, PC and Hifi systems.
• Fusing communication with entertainment by removing barriers and offering unlimited sharing opportunities, multiplying the value of people’s entertainment experiences through a host of innovative web applications and Sony Ericsson’s unique Play Now offering.

“Idou” is a concept name for this phone and not the final name under which the product will be marketed to the public. Idou encapsulates the future of mobile entertainment in the palm of your hand delivering visual communication like never before.

Capture moments, talk through pictures and share all your experiences like never before with the 12.1 megapixel camera, intuitive touch features and Xenon flash. Tap directly into your favourite videos and tracks with the full-touch media menu and feast your eyes on movies, TV-series and video clips in true 16:9 widescreen format. Based on what will become the Symbian Foundation operating system, thousands of applications are available online letting you install new applications and download exciting content from PlayNow™ to make the Idou truly yours.

Idou will be based on the upcoming Symbian Foundation operating system (the open, royalty-free mobile platform based on the Symbian and S60 platforms) and will be available 2nd Half of 2009.

Several Considerations

Idou will be good communication entertainment concept for the future, but handhone TV and other entertainment handsets have launches on the market. What Idou special have ? We can wait and try it after available on the public markets.

Megapixels are too often equated to image quality. As increased amounts of data are recorded on sensors that are half the size of a postage stamp, graininess and degraded image quality often are the result.

Sensor size, image processing hardware and software, image format (compressed or RAW), lens quality, and numerous other components are all just as, or more important than megapixel count.

Broadband on Rails

http://www.technologyreview.com/
By Rachel Kremen on Tuesday, December 30, 2008

A compact lens could make high-speed Internet access commonplace on trains.

Internet access can make a train trip far more productive and enjoyable. But train-mounted satellite dishes that send and receive data can't be used on a lot of routes, as the standard hardware is too big to fit in some tunnels. Now researchers at the University of York, in England, have developed an alternative: a dome-shaped plastic lens that's less than half as high as a typical satellite dish. The system, which was developed with funding from the European Space Agency, is also designed to track multiple satellites at once, making it more reliable than a dish.

"Here in the U.K., a lot of our railway infrastructure is very old," says John Thornton, a research fellow in the Department of Electronics at the University of York, who led the lens research. Low bridges and tunnels offer minimal headroom for satellite dishes, which Thornton says are about 62 centimeters high. Thornton's lens, in contrast, is only 30 centimeters high--short enough to meet the needs of the train industry.

The York project is based on an existing design, called a Luneburg lens. "The traditional approach would be to make [the lens] out of novel materials with certain properties," says Thornton. "I thought, 'What materials are practical and could work?'" Ultimately, the team decided on the plastics polyethylene and polystyrene, which are less expensive than the materials traditionally used to make Luneburg lenses but achieve the necessary performance. Thornton says that recent laboratory tests confirmed that the lens was able to receive digital video broadcasts, meaning that it could handle at least four megabits of data per second.

The York system also offers increased reliability. With a traditional satellite system, a separate dish is required for each satellite, and the whole dish has to move to track the signal. Moving an entire dish is fine if it's mounted on a stable structure, such as the roof of a house, but not if it's affixed to the side of a train that's running through tunnels and under bridges. A lot of room is required around the device at all times, to ensure that it doesn't hit something while tracking a signal.

With Thornton's device, incoming radiation bounces off the surface on which the lens is mounted. The lens concentrates the reflected radiation to a single point on its surface, where it's collected by a motorized antenna called a feed. To track the signal, only the feed needs to move, as opposed to the entire dish in a conventional system. Moreover, several feeds can roam around the surface of the lens at once, collecting signals from satellites in different locations.

Having extra feeds increases the redundancy of the system, Thornton says. "If one of the possible feeds isn't working, then you've got a spare." Different beams could also be enlisted for different services, he says, noting that one could be used to provide live television while another is used for Internet access.

Ratul Mahajan, a researcher with Microsoft's networking group who has been working on wireless Internet connections for cars, questions why Thornton chose to use satellite Internet instead of 3G, a telecommunications standard that's becoming common in cellular-telephone networks. "Why use satellite at all?" Mahajan asks.

Thornton says that 3G currently doesn't have the kind of geographic coverage required for continuous Internet access along train routes. Upgrades to the cell network, he says, tend to be concentrated in towns. "Each base station can only offer the highest data rates to users typically one or two kilometers away, so a truly vast number would be needed to cover all the railway routes in a country the size of the USA, or even France," Thornton says.

Thornton is currently trying to find a commercial partner for his system but admits that it's not ready to hit the rails just yet. In fact, it has yet to be tested on a moving vehicle. The team still needs to develop a control system and protocols for handling multiple satellite feeds.